- The best feel-good news are about aiding helpless animals.
The holidays are a time for feeling good about things. And there’s nothing to put you in a better mood than a good animal rescue story.
Conveniently enough, there were three cases of unusual animals needing a helping hand just this week. Thanks to the rescue efforts, all of the involved animals survived and are expected to make it through the holidays.
Let’s take a closer look at how each case unfolded. Here are three stories involving, hawks, snakes, moose, and seals, oh my.
The Snake and Hawk Tangle
We’d imagine having to go break up a fight over the holidays isn’t a call any cop wants to get. But Deputy Nick Aldous can feel good about his actions on December 19.
The Floridian deputy received a report of an injured large bird hopping around on a sidewalk near Gainesville. As the nearest relevant figure of authority, Aldous got sent to the scene.
Once there, he did indeed find a hawk on the sidewalk. But the hawk wasn’t alone.
It was locked in a deathmatch with a snake that had tangled itself around the bird.
“Holy cow, you’re never going to believe this, but the bird was trying to eat a snake and the snake had strangled it,” Aldous can be heard saying on his body camera footage.
Despite his initial thoughts, both animals were still alive. Aldous decided he’d do his best to keep them that way.
He grabbed a pair of towels and began to try and separate the fighting animals. It took him a couple of minutes, but he eventually pulled the snake and bird apart.
The snake — fortunately non-venomous — quickly slithered away. The hawk, on the other hand, stayed on the grass for a while, staring at Aldous with a decidedly ungrateful expression.
There’s just no pleasing some people, or birds.
A Moose Overboard
The second rescue story involves an animal much bigger than a bird or snake. Washington state residents Paula Pershall-Gilbert and her husband Bill noticed that a moose had fallen into the Little Spokane River.
The river ice had given in under the large animal’s weight. The animal was struggling in vain to try and pull herself out of the water.
Pershall-Gilbert and her husband called the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife to ask for help. However, they were initially reluctant to help the animal due to the involved risks.
“We initially said we wouldn’t attempt a rescue because wild animals, cold weather, and water are a recipe for a human to get hurt,” WDFD Communications Manager Staci Lehman said.
However, an officer sent to inspect the situation thought the animal could be rescued without endangering people. He coordinated a rescue effort with the Pend Oreille Fire Department.
The project wasn’t easy, though. It took five hours to get a rope around the moose and break a path through the ice to get it ashore.
But eventually, they managed to get the moose out of the river. Fortunately, the animal didn’t seem hurt — she rested for 10 minutes before walking away with her calf that had watched the rescue operation.
A Bambi story successfully averted.
A Seal out of Water
In South Africa, a wild animal ran into the exact opposite problem than the Washington moose. This beast was stuck on dry land.
On December 21, reports started coming in about an unusual animal blocking traffic. Somehow, a cape fur seal had managed to drag itself onto Jakes Gerwel Road in Athlone, a Cape Town suburb.
Obviously, tarmac is no place to be for a seal and the animal was struggling to move along. The big, scary cars moving around it probably didn’t help at all.
After receiving a report about the animal, rescuers from the Cape of Good Hope Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) raced to the scene. Police officers diverted traffic around them while the rescuers laboriously wrangled the seal into a transportation crate.
That was the hard part, though. After the seal was finally in the crate, the Cape of Good Hope SPCA personnel drove it to the nearest beach where it gladly slid back into the waves.
How the seal got on the road remains a mystery, though.
“One theory is that it had swum into a canal and was washed further away by strong currents, or that it was intended to be an unusual Christmas gift for someone’s mother-in-law and then merely dumped when its captor saw the price of fish,” said the Cape of Good Hope SPCA.
All’s well that ends well. But don’t try to gift seals to anyone, please.
Hits: 0
